Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…was it horrifying? And was it really scary? Absolutely. And imagine this wasn't investors. Imagine this was a customer, someone who you were trying to convince to buy your thing and that you knew what you were doing and you had attention to detail and you had everything just buttoned up and under control. Well, now you've lost face. Now you look foolish. And that's why when you have mission-critical products like email, where you are interfacing with customers, with candidates, with investors, it turns out to really matter. Email is mission-critical. So it's not something where you can simply launch with a half-baked product. This is such an important nuance take on, there's always this debate, how much to focus on craft and user experience, how much to focus on time to launch and get it out and speed. And what I'm hearing here, which I completely agree with, is it depends on the market you're in and the criticality, essentially, of your product. So if it's email, it just needs to work. You need to get that right. You need to spend all the time. You need to get that right. This reminds me of something else that one of your early investors shared with me, Bill Trenchard from First Round Capital. He talked about how speed was the thing that you just dialed up as a lever to like 11. That's where you just we will make this the focus speed, speed, speed. And I think that maybe the lesson there is just you pick the thing that you think will most differentiate you, make you significantly better than what's out there. So I guess just thoughts and just how to decide how you decided speed was the thing you were going to obsess with. And just, I don't know, advice for folks that are trying to decide where to dial up things to 11. Bill is right, and I agree with him. You have to pick something. Knowing what to pick is the trick. And in the early days of Superhuman, I read a book on positioning that really influenced my thinking. And it is, I believe, called Positioning the Battle for Your Mind. And it struck me how the most well-known brands have stood for one clear thing, like they have a clear position. And so in order for Superhuman to be memorable, I believed that we needed to occupy a clear position that was unique and which was available and which reinforced our product strategy. In the first year of Superhuman, therefore, I interviewed hundreds of potential customers about their experience with Gmail and with Outlook. And predictably, almost everybody said that email takes way too much time. But interestingly, many people also said that Gmail and Outlook were way too slow. And that was how I first thought that speed could be an interesting position for us. I then asked myself, is the position of speed unique and is it available? And the answer was overwhelmingly yes, because almost no software was being sold or has ever been sold. on the value proposition of speed the last time i could remember anyone trying to do this was when google launched chrome and obviously that went incredibly well for them and you may remember they had slow motion videos where they were comparing chrome render web pages and showing that was faster than an actual strike of lightning no one had done it since then And I then asked, well, does speed reinforce our product strategy? And again, the answer was overwhelmingly yes. I knew that our competition was not going to be startups. It was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggle with speed because by definition, they have massive scale and usually entrenched architecture. And then finally, I did what I call the cocktail party test, which is to look at cocktail parties and to watch how people pitch your product to other people. And in our case, the pitches were simple. People would say, dude, you have to use it. It's really fucking fast. And that's it. That was the pitch. And that's how I knew that speed would be a really great position for us to start with.…

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